Category Archives: TrollMamma

Last night, as the fast ended, I sat with my cup of tea and a slice of Elite Confectionery’s finest honey cake, and perused Facebook — all of which are collectively, I believe, the official modern day remedy for post-fast headache and stomach rumblings.

Imagine my horror when i discovered in my feed that someone who I once knew at school had taken my pre-Yom Kippur blessing, the words that I had elegantly crafted myself for the specific purpose of communicating with my many friends and relatives, and plagiarised them in their entirety as his own. No credit. No sharing. Theft, pure and simple.

I was (almost) speechless by this act of sheer impudence. The person in question and I had never been close — high school is full of cliques, and we were neither of us ever in the popular kids’ crowd, but we were also not in similar social groups. But we knew each other. All in all, cliques aside, it was quite a friendly atmosphere for a high school, particularly in the final two years. So I didn’t know him well, and from a distance had thought of him as nice enough, mostly harmless and a bit weasley-looking.

Apparently, “weasley” just about describes it. Word for word, he lifted what I said. Word for fucking word. Not a word of apology, remorse or regret. Grand theft status.

I was (am) absolutely livid. Incandescent with rage, even. And yet, the reaming that he deserves will never happen. I just spent 25 hours in self-reflection and personal prayer, thinking of how I could be a better person. While the temptation to explode all over his Facebook page in lethal writer mode, with words that would cause him to rethink his very existence, was enormously strong, I curbed myself and blocked him instead. It’s not that I said nothing — discretion may be the better part of valour, but there’s a limit to how zen and spiritual I can be when I’m riled. When I saw it, I straightaway commented about how I **forgave him for stealing my words without permission or say-so**, and how **giving credit would have been the right thing to do**. The little shit de-friended me on the spot, which further fuels the “weasel” hypothesis.

I use words in my daily life as my tools and props. Words are what allow me to express myself in my personal life, and are also the very things that enable me to make a living. I’m blessed to have always had this ability with language — one of my earliest memories was writing out my frustration at my mother by viciously criticizing a dress of hers. I never showed it to her, but it eased the tangled fury in my head and I could breathe again. I was six years old.

I choose to use my power for good, rather than to sully my talent with the blood of this pathetic individual. And there would be bloodshed, make no mistake. If I chose to tear him apart using my keyboard as a weapon, be very sure that I would. I choose not to, because I’m better than him. I shall let the higher authorities do their worst with him (Facebook? Ha!) and I have prevented him from ever seeing another word that I publish.

The theft of intellectual property leaves a person feeling as violated and laid bare as a physical robbery. This may even be worse, since physical items can be replaced. Yet, his conscience is his business, and for him to reconcile with her Ladyship god almighty as he sees fit. He’s clearly a sad little person with low self esteem, and the inability to own his own shit. Poor poor him.

I stand every week at my networking meeting and talk about my skill with words but at this moment as another day starts to break over the sea which I can glimpse from my salon window, I feel inadequate beyond measure. The light of the yahrzeit candle for my mother-in-law, who died forty four years ago today, flickers and I think of all those families for whom tonight will have been a sad and sleepless one as each of them realises that the brave, caring, courageous young men who went out to defend their country will not be returning.

Rage against the unmitigated evil we are facing, an evil that is almost beyond measure, an evil that betrays a vision of inhumanity…

Hypothetical situation, crowd-sourcing opinions. Read all the way to the end before giving me the benefit of your opinion.

A person works at a company. Their spouse has been unemployed for over a year and half, and unsuccessful at finding gainful, permanent employment, despite their best efforts.

A job comes up at the company where this person (TP) works, so they give in their spouse’s CV for a potential job. A telephonic interview is conducted between potential boss (PB) and said spouse (SS), and SS is told they will be contacted the following week to arrange a further and more in-depth interview.

The following week, SS receives an irate phone call from PB, to the tune of “where the hell are you?”. It transpires that PB sent a Google calendar invitation to SS, which never arrived (verified), and didn’t follow up on confirming, except to send a reminder TEN MINUTES before the start of proposed interview.

SS is taken aback, and utterly distraught at the thought that a possible job opportunity is disappearing into thin air through no fault of their own, and pleads their case to PB — to no avail.

SS then calls TP and asks for them to call PB and explain the situation, since PB had been so irate at the no-show, that SS believes that she didn’t take in the fact that a genuine misunderstanding had occurred. TP, caught between doing 87 things at once (in the week before Pesach) agrees to call, despite the fact (realised after the event) that it is possibly not the most appropriate of phone calls, under the circumstances.

TP then calls PB, to try to explain, not to beg for further chances or anything — and gets reamed for interfering. PB is CONVINCED that SS knew about the interview because it had been discussed during the original telephonic interview — which SS maintains is completely not the case, and TP is very inclined to believe them, knowing them as they do (being spouses/ spice / whatever) and also knowing that when a person has been unable to find work for over a year and a half, said person is unlikely to fuck up on purpose.

The situation is now like this:
— The job is a no-go, the rejection letter has been sent and received.
— TP has searched the email account of SS, to which she has full consensual access BTW, and no interview date was sent to the calendar. A reminder was sent (mentioned above, 10 minutes before start of the-interview-that-never happened, but the interview does not appear in the calendar, backing up SS’s claim.
— It seems to TP that there was a huge cock-up, and that while apportioning blame does not help, PB could and should accept 100% responsibility for their 50% of the equation.

TP would REALLY like to say the following to PB, but is being cautious because, hey — they do have to work together. However, they don’t have to work together very much, and TP believes that this needs saying:

“I appreciate that it was inappropriate of me to call you in that way the other day. However, my intention was not to beg, or put you in any kind of uncomfortable position, nor did i expect you to help out simply because it was my spouse in question.

“That said, I sincerely hope that you never have to undergo the crippling humiliation of being cast aside like yesterday’s rubbish by a large corporation which buys the company where you have given 13 years of dedicated service, and decides that it no longer has any use for you because you are too expensive. That you should never feel the shame that comes from being unable to secure gainful employment because you’re not in the right age bracket. That your years of hard work have garnered you so many years of useless experience, because you’re too expensive, or “you’d be bored doing this menial shit”, or “i can’t hire you, you’re better than me and would take my job out from under me”. That you should never have to feel depressed at being so useless. That you should never feel the debilitating effects of being on the dole.

“Life looks rosy for you now — at the tender age of 29, working in a start-up with great prospects. However, one thing I have learned in my 45 years. Life is a long road that is full of twists and turns. You never know what’s around the corner.

Not for the first time in my life, I almost sent an anonymous letter to someone today. Almost. I’ve never done it. Every time it comes to that crucial moment, I realise that I’m a better person than that, and there are more productive ways to work through my anger. But today, I wanted to make this obnoxious little weasel squirm.

I forgot, you see, that in addition to all the amazing people out there in cyberspace, there are many sad and pathetic little people who love to throw out vitriol and bile, and then disappear like a rat up a drainpipe, unwilling to talk it out, or back up their claims — or, in short, to act like a reasonable and stable adult. I forgot that to act in such a way is to lower myself way, way down to a level at which I have never felt comfortable — and with good reason. The expression “act your age, not your shoe size” has never resonated so much with me.

Today, I nearly cracked. Nearly — but thankfully, not quite. Just in time, I remembered how to behave. Took a deep breath. Felt my own vitriol seeping away, dissipating into the ether. Regaining perspective — and thank god I did. I spend far too much time looking in the mirror to have to cringe each time I did, which I would.

The below is what I nearly sent.

I’ve heard all about you. The word is out there over the internet. Insulting people and running away. Not having the guts to stand and discuss an issue like a real person.

How anyone who disagrees with you is a “cunt”.

How you don’t know how to hold your end of a discussion without resorting to gutter speak.

How anyone who picks up the end of your sweepingly dramatic and childish proclamations and asks you about term is “attacking you”.

How you squeal like a little boy and run away, blocking anyone who has an opinion that doesn’t match yours, bemused at the fact that you try to play with the grown-ups but clearly aren’t one yourself.

Don’t you know how to hold a discussion like an adult? Clearly not. Still too much of a baby.

For someone who wants to start a family, I’d sincerely advise that you take a class in being an adult before you throw away your condoms.

How does it feel, dickwad? Enjoy it, do you? Poison pen letters? Can you take it as well as you dish it out?

I didn’t think so.

“Cowards die many times before their deaths. The valiant never die but once.” William Shakespeare.

I should warn you, tonight’s post will include mud-flinging, bitching, whining and much ire-worthy bellyaching. Because that’s just the way I roll.

Grrr.

We shall start with the aptly named Twat of the Evening. I attended a school concert where one of the trolls performed this evening. Such things are, as any parent reading will testify, a joy from beginning to end. If, of course, by joy you mean achingly wide nightmare of yawningly depressing dances one after the other where your kid — the next Darcy Bussel, naturellement — appears in dance number two, and dance number 23 — of 23.

Go on, take a moment to empathize with me, parents of children in the Holy Land. I know you do.

Sitting through the evening was helped by sitting with friends, and much laughter abounded, possibly at bits that were not intended to be funny.

Finally, after about a millenia, the final dance arrives. The final dance takes eight minutes of my life that I’ll never get back, during only the final two of which do the Trollette’s dainty toes hit the stage. I am, as you can surely imagine, in a state of fevered excitement at a. watching the offspring and b. ending this evening. And then it happens. That moron who thinks they are free to stand up and move around an audience, blocking the view of he-could-give-a-shit-whom, does precisely this — and guess who he blocks?

What message could I possibly send to this unfortunate individual, who clearly recently underwent a lobotomy in order to display such a profound lack of sense, common or otherwise? Are there words more plain than “dude, you’re blocking the view of the 97 other sets of parents all of whose children are on the stage while you do your David Bailey impressions”? Or, as I daintily yelled at him, “sit the heck down!”

[Note: For those of you who have met me, and doubt that I am capable of (or likely to) yell(ing) something with such an abject lack of profanity, please be aware, I yelled in Hebrew.]

My yelling had the desired effect, and then after the final dance, he came back looking for me — to yell back.

Cue three-pointed finger snap and “oh no he DI-N’T!”

Yes, he did.

Twat.

_____________________________________________________

And now, a word from my soapbox:

Saying “so and so is my friend” does not justify bad behavior on said friend’s part. Neither does it permit self-righteousness and preachy-type behaviour. I appreciate loyalty — but blindness to the faults of another when faced with hard evidence can be irresponsible, foolish and even dangerous. Not to mention pathetic and immature. And particularly — specifically, in fact — in a situation when you are supposed to be acting in authority — shame on you. Enabling is enabling, whether the abuse is mental or physical.

All I can say is this: Karma is, as noted by many other far more worthy than I, a fucking bitch. And god bless her for it.

I used to blog a lot — here, and elsewhere. I got taken down by online stalkers, I had my email hacked, I got bored, I saw something shiny — a hundred and more genuine and valid reasons why I ceased to blog. Work got in the way, which was never a problem when all i did was technically write, but as soon as I expanded my horizons to a more prolific set of writing varieties, my need to express my deepest and innermost thoughts and feelings to an internet full of people I didn’t know and would never meet became less pressing.

But now the dust has settled and blogging is no longer the hottest thing on the planet, and hey, looky looky — I’m blogging again. (Thank god for spellchecks, that was nearly “logging”. I know that it’s the fashion to share every intimate detail online, but I fear that discussions about when I produce a log are unnecessarily intimate.) It’s less surprising to me than it might be to you — face it, of my readership, which includes Liza and whoever googled the words “looky looky”, only Liza knows me well, and even she’d be forgiven for being surprised. I would say I buck the trend as a matter of course, but I do tend to do things that are not the hottest shit around, at my own pace. Occasionally I trendset, more often I catch up after everyone else has always moved on. (Like now, basically.)

But still. Writing for me is something I’ve neglected. Bad Trollmamma. I promise to do better.